DRAGON LINKS

Links to Items of Further Interest

a) The following links describe the geography of my city, province
(the Afghan Province within Pakistan), and historic locations such as
the Khyber Pass (immortalised by Rudyard Kipling in English literature):

b) These links describe the initial ancient history of the Afghan
area - when it was first settled by the Aryans....in those days it was
known as "Ariana" or Land of the Aryans. It thereafter became part of
the first great Persian empire of antiquity - which was destroyed by
Alexander the Great. This was prior to the arrival of the Scythians:

c)
The links that follow are assorted bits of information on the Turkic
Xiongnu, Tocharian and Hunnish peoples, which played such a central role
in late Pashtun history as well as that of Northern India - and were
the last major influence that shaped their ethnicity.

Of particular interest is the Kabul Shahi dynasty - a dynasty of White
Huns who converted to Hinduism, and ruled Afghanistan and Northern India
for 500 years..... from the time that Scythian power fell to the Huns,
right upto the advent of the Islamic era - which still continues. It was
during this Kabul Shahi era that Hepthalite/White Hun influences were
consolidated in Pashtun culture and ethnicity. As their name suggests,
they were based in Kabul, which is also the present Afghan capital, as
it was 1500 years ago:

e)
Islam first arrived in this area about 1000 years ago when the last
remnants of the Kabul Shahis were toppled by the Muslim Seljuk Turk
Ghaznavid dynasty.....but it only really began taking root here about
800 years ago under the Iranian-Turkic Ghorid dynasty. Links about both
are given below; the Muslim era of the area's history still
continues.....

f)
Lastly, the two links below serve to give you a wider informal, yet
intrinsically important perspective of how this area is and has been
viewed by its own peoples..... and its integration into the greater
Central Asian and Eurasian Persian-Turkic continuity and contiguity
that has dominated the area since time immemorial......but both of which
fused, together with Islamic influences - during the past 1000 years to
form what we now see as the Central Asian/Persian-Turkic
milieu....therefore the area was variously known by the Persian name
Khorasan ("Land of the Rising Sun"), and Turkestan (or Land of the
Turks) - the latter being its name right uptil the time that the Soviets
under Stalin divided it up into the five former Soviet republics we now
see: Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan.
In old times, the races of this area were predominantly Turkic, while
the language and culture was Persian. Of course, the use of these terms
was widely applied, and ebbed and flowed, but the definition Khorasan
included Afghanistan as well, whereas significant parts of Turkestan
were also included in the territory of the Afghan kingdom till as late
as 1885. Even modern Persia, Iran we now know it, is only Persian
insofar as its culture and language go....but it has really been over
ruled by Turks - most of these being Turkmen - for the greater part of
the last 1000 years till the present. So both these terms are,
confusingly interchangeable - yet both stand alone as distinct labels
too:

KHORASAN

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_KhorasanKhorasan was originally inhabited by the ancient [[Indo-Iranians] who migrated from the north to the Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex in around 2000 BC. The BMAC was a Bronze Age culture situated in the upper Amu Darya region of Khorasan. Airyanem Vaejah (Land of Aryans), which is mentioned in the ZoroastrianAvesta, is also believed by some scholars to be situated in the territories of Khorasan.

The Persian people
appear to have been the first ethnic group to populate the region, but
they began mixing with an increasing number of foreign invaders and as a
result their proportionate number was reduced.[21] Significant immigrants such as Arabs from the west since the 7th century and Turkic peoples after the Turkic migration from the north in the Middle Ages settled in the region.

In the Islamic period, Persian Iraq and Khorasan were the two important territories. The boundary between these two was the region surrounding the cities of Gurgan and Damghan.[4] In particular, the Ghaznavids, Seljuqs and Timurids divided their empires into Iraqi and Khorasani regions. The adjective Greater is added these days to distinguish the historical region from the Khorasan province of Iran, which roughly encompasses the western half of the historical Khorasan.[8]
It is also used to indicate that ancient Khorasan encompassed a loose
collection of territories individually known by other popular names,
such as Bactria, Khwarezmia, Sogdiana, Transoxiana, and Sistan or Arachosia.

Before the region was conquered by Alexander the Great in 330 BC, it was part of the Achaemenid Empire and prior to that it was occupied by the Medes. The region that became known as Khorasan was called Ariana at that time, which made up part of Greater Iran or the land where Zoroastrianism was the dominant religion. The southeastern region of Ariana fell to the Kushan Empire in the 1st century AD. The Kushan rulers introduced Buddhism in the Hindu Kush and nearby areas, in what is now Afghanistan. Numerous Buddhist temples and buried cities have been found in Afghanistan.[12][13]
However, the region of Ariana (or Khorasan) remained predominantly
Zoroastrian. One of the three great fire-temples of the Sassanids
"Azar-burzin Mehr" is situated near Sabzevar in Iran. The boundary of the region began changing until the Kushans and Sassanids merged together to form the Kushano-Sassanian civilization.

During the Sassanid era, the Persian Empire was divided into four quarters, Khvarvaran in the west, Bakhtar in the north, Nīmrūz in the south and Khorasan in the east next to Sind or Hind. Khorasan in the east saw some conflict with the Hephthalites
who became the new rulers in the area but the borders remained stable.
Being the eastern parts of the Sassanids and further away from Arabia, Khorasan quarter was conquered after the remaining Persia. The last Sassanid king of Persia, Yazdgerd III,
moved the throne to Khorasan following the Arab invasion in the western
parts of the empire. After the assassination of the king, Khorasan was
conquered by Muslim troops in 647 AD. Like other provinces of Persia it
became one of the provinces of Umayad dynasty.

Among them, the periods of the Ghaznavids of Ghazni
and Timurids of Herat are considered as the most brilliant eras of
Khorasan's history. During these periods, there was a great cultural
awakening. Many famous Persian poets, scientists and scholars lived in
this period. Numerous valuable works in Persian literature were written. Nishapur, Herat, Ghazni and Merv were the centers of all these cultural developments.

Swat Valley

Field Marshal Sir Claude John Eyre Auchinleck, Commander in Chief of the British Indian Army, reviewing the Amb State Guard, escorted by Ali Asghar Khan and Subedar-Major Shah Zaman of the Amb State Guard, Darband, 1941.

Amb was known as Embolina during Greco-Bactrian rule two millennia ago, and was a princely state ruled by a Turco-Mongol family called Tanoli - and had a sizeable Karlugh Turk population; it contains several locations with Turkic related place names such as Tarnawa, Tarnawai, and Tanawal.....and Haplogroup Q1b has been detected here in the royal family of an earlier Turkic stock, namely the Swati-Jehangiris, who ruled the adjacent Swat principality from about 1009 AD to 1519 AD. This suggests an Ashina origin for the Swatis.....and they probably came here with the first Muslim Turks, the Seljuks, as their tradition states.

The later Karlugh arrivals in the area were in around c.1400 AD, with the Turkic conqueror and descendant of Genghis Khan,Tamerlane and his armies - and they gave this region its present name of Hazara. This occurred just after the great Khazar empire had been decimated first by the Mongols and then dispersed by the Bubonic Plague.

So, we may conclude that those Karlugh invasions could well have included Khazars too, who brought the Khazar place names to the area, as well as the murky yet strangely lingering tradition of Jewish origins for certain Pashtun tribes. They certainly came from the same areas. The name Hazara is derived from the Persian word "hazar", meaning one thousand, which was the number of soldiers in the basic legion or unit of Gengis Khan's Mongol armies; the term was later kept in use by all the diverse Turkic successors of the Mongols, among whom both Tamerlane and the later Tanolis figured, yet a full century lay between these two.